The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed inventions.
A single a multi-tenant database system operates to store data on behalf of a multitude of paying subscribers, each being a “tenant” of the database system, hence the term multi-tenant database system.
Within such an operational environment, computational efficiency, system responsiveness, and data security are all of paramount concern both to the provider of the multi-tenant database system and to the subscribers or tenants of such a system. Moreover, as cloud based technology has matured and become increasingly commonplace within the marketplace over the past several years there has been an increased sensitivity to data privacy concerns as well as regulation mandating certain protections and controls on data protection and privacy. For instance, cloud based technologies, if they are to remain competitive, must adhere to contractual requirements, marketplace concerns regarding, trade-secrets information, as well as state and Federal laws mandating certain privacy and data safeguards.
Notwithstanding these requirements, there is also a need to ensure comprehensive testing of the cloud based technologies which store data on behalf of subscribers. For instance, it is sometimes the case that software released into the production environment passes testing procedures based upon synthetic data used for testing purposes yet fails when applied to live customer data in the production environment, at which point the error is far more damaging and costly than had it been caught prior to production release.
To that end, it would be highly beneficial to utilize actual live production data belonging to such customers in the testing of the hardware, software, and other infrastructure modifications to the multi-tenant database system, but for the legal and privacy related reasons noted above, use of customers' data in such a way would be improper and would potentially represent a contractual breach as well as a compliance violation.
The present state of the art may therefore benefit from the systems, methods, and apparatuses for implementing data masking via compression dictionaries as described herein.